My early obsession with radioactivity, around the age of 11, I decided to build a Farnsworth Fusor.

Invented by Philo Farnsworth, the "father of the TV", the fusor is an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion reactor. Using the Deuterium-Deuterium, 2H(d,n)3He, fusion reaction it can become a very effective neutron source. Neutron fluxes produced with such a device average between 105  and 107 neutrons/sec which make neutron activation of several elements possible. With the device I built became the 31st and youngest person to ever create nuclear fusion.

Measuring Neutrons (Proof of Fusion):

   

                Bubble Dosimeter

Control Panel:

 

Fusion "star"

Deuterium

Plasma

Pulsed Power:

This project started in Summer, 2011. The Plasma Focus, another form of Beam-Target Fusion Reactor, operated in a pulsed modality. Developed in the early 1960s independently by Mather and Filipinov, it uses a large capacitor bank to induce a discharge in fairly high (compared with that of a Fusor) pressure gas (1-10 Torr).